Computer science researchers have been exploring ideas associated with “smart spaces” or ubiquitous computing for years. One of the most important challenges has been creating new, intuitive user interfaces that are suitable for ubiquitous computing applications, but are not based on traditional personal computing platforms. The challenge is to make these new devices and applications simple and intuitive to use. Donald Norman describes some of the challenges in designing such a user interface in the book, THE INVISIBLE COMPUTER.
In an attempt to address the design challenges of user interfaces suitable for ubiquitous computing applications, there has been significant work in the area of point-and-click user interfaces and the application of point-and-click ideas to ubiquitous computing research. Traditional infrared (IR) remote controls are an obvious example. In this regard, IR remote controls are being developed today to allow users to control a number of different entities from a single controller. Another example of the application of point-and-click ideas to ubiquitous computing research is the “Cooltown” research project within Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Generally, in accordance with the Cooltown research project, users can interact with entities using wireless communication devices to execute uniform resource locators (URLs) to web resources such that the wireless communication device can thereafter interact with the web resources.
Whereas previous real-world point-and-click techniques allow users to interact with entities in a predetermined manner, such as to control the entity or link to web resources, such techniques are inflexible. In this regard, most systems employing such techniques are single purpose devices. For example, Cooltown uses wireless communication devices to achieve limited, multi-application, point and click functionality. Cooltown protocols are used to send and receive URLs and these URLs are assumed to point to HTML documents. Cooltown can be thought of as a sort of real-world, web browsing system. The flexibility of this approach is limited, however, because it is based on URLs that only point to web resources.